Just as the same banking/investment firms which wrecked the American global economy are about to finesse any real Congressional regulations, we must understand the magnitude of what they got away with, and will again. The laissez-faire type of capitalism with which they are intimately associated is seemingly quiescent, laying low, but by no means gone away. The type of unbridled corporate capitalism American multinational businesses evolved between the 1980's and the September, 2008 markets crash, involving overt collusion between and amongst government agencies and Congress, think tanks, media propagandists and speculative banking, not only parallels what wrought American finance in the '20s and '30s, but also defines what came to be known in Italy in the '30s and '40s as Fascism. Fascism's original name, appropriately, was 'corporatism'; the word 'fascism' simply was a slangy shortening of fasce, the type of uniform worn by Italian soldiers.
The collusion of the business school MBA degree and unbridled corporate capitalism has been well documented (most recently by English writer Philip Delves Broughton in his nonfiction account of 'What They Teach you at Harvard Business School: My Two years inside the Cauldron of Capitalism'. The two qualities most valued at Harvard's “B” school and top management of Corporate America, according to the book, are greed and hubris.
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Sandra Small Gallery's current show 'The Erotic Gaze,' organized by independent curator (and regular ÆQAI contributor) Daniel Brown, seeks to explore the shift of eroticized art from that which has been made for the “male gaze,” to that which is currently being created by a wider range of artists for a broader audience.
The notion of the “male gaze” came out of feminist art theory in the 1970s. Looking back through a centuries-old procession of images, feminists charged that, since pretty much the dawn of time, art had been made by male artists for a male audience. They also purported that the “male gaze” permeated popular culture, and this is arguably still very much the case—just watch a few music videos or look at fashion advertising. Artists, both male and female, have been complicating the matter for decades, and 'The Erotic Gaze' provides some compelling examples.
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Elegeia - the term refers to an ancient Greek tradition of memorial poetry, implying that the work in question commemorates loss. But the loss to which the exhibition 'Elegeia: Works by Brenda Stumpf and Tom Kelly' at the Eva G. Farris Art Gallery refers is not specific; it seems to reflect the mood of an epoch looking back upon some previous mode of human existence. For the artists refer to antiquity both in the formal and narrative aspects of their art: Stumpf through impermanence and architectural/historical/mystical references, and Kelly through his interpretation of Sappho's verse.
We may gain insight through the writings of the philosopher Hegel, although admittedly his prose often daunts readers. What he referred to as the 'Romantic' era (based on, though different from, the actual Romantic movement, though I will use the term loosely), as part of his metanarrative of the unfolding of World Spirit, represented a shift from the preceding one (the 'Classical') and was characterized in part by its wistful reflections upon the previous era. For Classical art embodied, according to Hegel, the unity of Spirit and Matter, the outer body rendered as an image of higher perfection (Greek sculpture). The Romantic phase, intuiting the infinite quality of Spirit, felt that finite matter—the external world—was inadequate for the represention of the Eternal. Nevertheless the Romantic, faced with the incommensurability between the outer world and the inner, looked longingly at the simple beauty and unity of Classical art; it represented an irretrievable consciousness and incomparable beauty. For example, the Romantics, as per their namesake, 'romanticized' the classical era by frequently painting ancient ruins. It is in this sense that the exhibition is elegiac: These two artists, both in the narrative and formal qualities of their artwork, create in the Romantic mood.
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Retrenchment in the Arts
